Research paper
Propagating the Haze? Community and professional perceptions of cannabis cultivation and the impacts of prohibition

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2017.07.015Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

Recent decades have seen substantial changes in the UK cannabis landscape, including increased domestic production, the ascendancy of stronger strains (namely ‘skunk’) and the drug’s reclassification under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. Resultantly, cannabis retains significance in the consciousness, priorities and policy agendas of communities, drug services and criminal justice agencies.

Methods

This paper presents an empirical study, which examined both perceptions and impacts of cannabis cultivation and its control within a North-West English borough. It draws on qualitative research with samples of professionals, practitioners, resident groups, cannabis users, cannabis users’ families and cannabis cultivators themselves.

Findings

The findings suggest that cannabis cultivation was not a uniformly familiar concept to respondents, who had limited knowledge and experience of its production. Across all participant groups, the transmission of accurate information was lacking, with individuals instead drawing on the reductionist drug discourse (Taylor, 2016) to fill knowledge deficits. Consequently, some participants conflated cannabis cultivation with wider prohibitionist constructions of drug markets, resulting in the diffusion of misinformation and an amplification of anxieties. In contrast, other participants construed cultivation as making economic sense during austerity, justifying such tolerance through inverse adherence to the same narrow socio-cultural construction of drugs i.e. that cultivation carried comparatively less harms than real drug markets. Enforcement mechanisms also drew on generic prohibitionist conceptions, assuming cultivators to be unconstrained, autonomous actors in need of punishment; a belief which lacked nuanced understanding of the local terrain where vulnerable individuals cultivating under duress played a key role in the supply chain.

Conclusion

The paper concludes with a call for the provision of accessible information/education; the need to challenge and reconceptualise the assumed autonomy and resultant punity directed at all cannabis cultivators; and a subsequent need to reassess established forms of legal (and increasingly social) enforcement.

Section snippets

Introduction: the cannabis cultivation terrain

There has been a general decline in the use of cannabis over the last two decades, yet it remains the most commonly used illegal drug in England and Wales (Home Office, 2016). Recent years have seen changes to the landscape of the UK cannabis market in relation to both the nature of the product and means of production. Whilst attention has been paid to cannabis users during this period (for example Foster & Spencer 2013), there has been little consideration of those who cultivate the drug.

Reducing the harm of prohibitionist cannabis cultivation policy: a review of the evidence and capacity for change

There is evidence that prohibitionist drug policies increase rather than mitigate drug related harms (Buchanan, 2015, Rolles and Murkin, 2014), with the pro-active policing of drug markets exemplifying the exacerbation of existing social problems (Kerr, Small, & Wood, 2005). The trend towards small-scale cannabis cultivation sites in the UK, prompted and sustained by attempts to police cannabis importation and production (O’Hagan & Parker, 2016), provides further evidence of this. Cultivation

Methodology

A qualitative mixed methods approach was adopted to meet three criteria. Firstly to grasp the full range of complex issues surrounding cannabis cultivation; secondly to recognise the sensitivity of the topic; and thirdly to meet the needs of the diverse range of participant groups (Fig. 1).2

Professionals and stakeholders (including probation, prison and police officers, housing personnel, drug services, young people’s services, council workers, NHS staff, social

Findings

The following sections outline the contemporary cannabis terrain in Thornbridge by triangulating data on the knowledge and impacts, particularly of skunk, from all participant groups. As the research was a scoping exercise, an inductive approach was taken, with key themes and patterns identified using the most commonly raised issues in the World Café, individual interviews and focus groups.

Conclusion: knowledge, anxieties and vulnerabilities

There have unquestionably been changes in the cannabis terrain, but concerns about the immediate impacts for cultivators and the communities around them must be contextualised: Firstly by distinguishing between direct experience, evidence-based information and common assumption; and secondly by couching the changes in the appropriate socio-economic and political context.

This study demonstrates that, in the absence of direct knowledge, experience or accurate, accessible information, many

Conflict of interest statement

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. The authors declare no conflict of interest in the publication of this work. The work has not been published previously, is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, is approved by all authors and will not be published elsewhere in the same form without the written consent of the copyright holder.

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